A little late in passing this on, but a curious piece of trivia: Blizzard were auctioning off the server blades for older realms in World of Warcraft. Hot Hardware has a good article about one of the server blades. Its intriguing to learn the specification of the server that ran a whole realm in the game (its not clear how …
Category archives: Blog
OnLive
OnLive appeared in our newsfeed again. They’ve been through a financial restructuring but are still alive and kicking and have continued to provide good gaming service. Perhaps their timing was wrong, perhaps with the next generation consoles being announced in the next couple of months, they may be superseded or have more direct competitors (what has …
999 Player FPS
The world record for number of players in a single game shard (and visible to each other!) has been officially broken (official meaning that Guinness World Records has verified it)! Man vs Machine browser-based FPS prototype developed by MuchDifferent supported a one-off event of 999 players. The event was made possible by their custom server backend, Pikkoserver. The client …
Local Area Networking
Tom’s Hardware has a good round-up of current LAN hardware suitable for home or small office networking. It gives a decent summary of standard wired and wireless networking hardware as well as a few more exotic systems such as power line networking. We should all be laying Cat6a UTP in anticipation of 10G Ethernet becoming cheap in …
Networking for the Web
There is an interesting article in CSCW2011 this year about the performance of different technologies for communicating with servers from within a web browser: Carl A. Gutwin, Michael Lippold, and T. C. Nicholas Graham. 2011. Real-time groupware in the browser: testing the performance of web-based networking. In Proceedings of the ACM 2011 conference on Computer supported …
Dead Rising 2
1000s of Zombies, 1000s of Problems: The Dead Rising 2 Multiplayer Experience by Dee Jay Randall Another interesting talk from GDC 2011. Dead Rising 2 is excellent fun: you get to mangle zombies in lots of different ways. It supports a two player co-operative mode. Just because of the nature of the game with thousands of potentially …
GDC Vault
Our last couple of posts were about two talks from GDC 2011. The GDC Vault contains hundreds of talks on all aspects of video game development. The talk slides are usually free. Members can access videos of the presentations, though some of those are free too. Here are a few more that are networking related: GDC2011: Large-scale Messaging …
Halo: Reach
I Shot You First Bungie’s Halo Reach by David Aldridge at GDC 2001 The talk is fascinating and has several videos to illustrate situations and tools (it is thus a very large download at 542MB!). David was lead network engineer on this project. There are lots of interesting insights on practical use of scalability techniques. As is common for modern FPS …
How to Run at 60Hz
We recently came across an interesting article on IMVU’s engineering blog. That blog is well worth following if you are interested in collaborative virtual environments: IMVU is one of the better social platforms and it constantly involves. They also give back to the open source community (notably through their contributions to Cal3D). Anyway, the recent article …
IEEE VR 2011 Course Finished
We had a successful course at IEEE Virtual Reality 2011 in Singapore. All the materials from the course are now online. Please let us know if you use them.